The Saga Begins

The post where the saga begins

Caption: Wait a minute, isn't that the crab from the blog? How meta...zoa.
Image: Gunnar Tribelhorn

Here’s the easy part; today marks the official launch of the blog Mad Metazoa, where I intend to cover all sorts of topics relating to the fields of animal behavior, nature, and scientific philosophy more broadly (I may even stray into the infernal world of politics from time to time).

What authority do I have in writing about these sorts of things? That's where it gets trickier. Justification has long evaded my capture; yea, some earlier iteration of the blog would already exist if I’d managed to nab it before. I can answer the inevitable questions about the name, however, and maybe somewhere in this explanation a bit of justification will reveal itself.

A name of two parts will require two explanations. I’ll start with the latter. ‘Metazoa’ is an old name, bestowed by the great illustrator-naturalist Ernst Haeckel in 1874 to differentiate the unicellular animals from the multicellular (‘metazoa’ literally translates to higher animals). Today, we know the unicellular organisms, or ‘protozoans’, aren’t animals at all, but a motley collection of unrelated single-celled organisms (now often referred to as ‘protists’). However, ‘metazoa’ stuck, and today refers to all proper animals*, which are multicellular anyway.** Confusing? All this really means is that the animal kingdom is properly defined as a group of organisms that share a common ancestor (a so-called ‘monophyletic’ group, or clade), the name of which is Metazoa.

Caption: A selection of Metazoans. Images: Gunnar Tribelhorn

*Some authors exclude Porifera, the sponges, Ctenophora, the comb jellies, or some combination from Metazoa proper.
**Nearly all animals are multicellular. The enigmatic parasites known as myxozoans have reverted to unicellularity in some cases.

Mad’s a word that usually means angry, but also sometimes ‘crazy’, or ‘loony’. And I must admit I’m mad for alliteration.

Did I manage to ensnare a bit of justification in the two preceding paragraphs? If you didn’t know what Metazoa meant, and now you do, I was a success. If you did know what it meant, but were entertained, or at least cared enough to finish reading, I’ll call that another success. And therein lies the justification for this blog. Both introducing lay audiences to scientific concepts and remaining relevant to those who are familiar with biology, all while remaining an enjoyable read to both parties, is the point of Mad Metazoa. If I haven’t managed to do these things, I apologize. I promise to get there in time.

…And that’ll conclude this post. Next time I will discuss the contents and backstory of my first research article, published last summer. You can find the article here if interested. Thanks for reading.